This ethnographic case study discusses friction in everyday information-seeking on smartphones and proposes new...
Tag: epistemology
Don’t Fear Friction: Complexity and Contradiction Are Pathways to Better Solutions
As ethnographers, we recognize the limitations of simplistic explanations and seek to delve deeper into the complex web of human existence. In our line of work, the very concept of friction goes from being a disturbing factor that should be neutralized or resolved in the data, to being the very thing we zoom in on to understand the world. Frictions, in their various forms, then become vital entry points to examine underlying issues, power dynamics, and cultural tensions that shape human realities, and unveil opportunities for a deeper understanding and new value-creating solutions.
How a Government Organisation Evolved to Embrace Ethnographic Methods for Service (and Team) Resilience: The Case of the Canadian Digital Service
Government websites and online services are often built with limited input from the people they serve. This approach limits their ability to respond to ever changing needs and contexts. This case study describes...
Beyond Representation: Using Infrastructure Studies to Reframe Ethnographic Agendas and Outcomes
The ethos and methods of participatory research have been widely embraced as a powerful approach to address systemic inequity in the design of technology. While there have been many gains and developments that...
The Climate Crisis as Learning Space
It is becoming widely accepted that the climate crisis is a multiscale breakdown of interrelated ecological systems, caused by behavioural patterns that are unsustainable. As behaviours are largely informed by ideologies and as the latter are passed on by education, we submit that the climate...
Theory Instruments as Tangible Ways of Knowing
While ethnographers and the data they produce already play a role in affecting industry practices, there is potential to integrate anthropological ways of seeing and knowing into a shared transdisciplinary...
Creating Future Imaginaries through Indigenous AI
Jason Edward Lewis' multidisciplinary research and creative practice has been central to developing Indigenous media art in North America and worldwide, establishing a vital conversation about the interaction between Indigenous culture and computational technology. His contributions comprise...
Intuition: Thinking through Loopholes
PechaKucha Presentation Intuition, contrary to common sense, is not a natural gift. Intuition is born out of experience and it can be a valuable tool for researchers. But what has intuition to do with anticipation? To anticipate we usually rely on understanding current behavioral patterns and...
Who Deserves to Be Observed?: Wrestling with the Avant-Garde
PechaKucha Presentation—What happens when the “mildly militaristic jargon of marketing” (2004, Sunderland, Taylor, Denny) seeps into the dialectic process of structuring applied research and blurs the meaning of its stakes? This provokingly titled PechaKucha stems from our experience of...
The Power of Not Thinking
The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them Simon Roberts 2020, 336 pp, Blink Publishing/Bonnier In The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them, Simon Roberts aims to resuscitate the human body from the sepulchre of Western thought,...